Further Clockwise

This is a poem from 2014 that takes the memory of being allowed to sit in my father’s lap to steer our car for a few minutes on our way home from weekend trips to my grandparents’ house in landlocked Secunderabad and transposes it into a completely different fictional setting in Vizag.

Saturday afternoons, having vanquished the mountains
That our grandmother fried and heaped on our plates,
Our grandfather took us cousins to tame the ocean.
We took in each hand the frayed South and East Indian coasts,
And kneaded and knuckled and knotted them tight.

On the way home, on roads empty for miles,
Mirages reflected the trembling skies.
One of us, ordained, by weekly rotation,
Would sit in the throne, the central command,
Turn the helm left to steer the earth right,
Honk to crack a whip at slacking oarsmen inside.

The instrument cluster, to us just one large circle,
With a needle taunting us to push it further clockwise.
Our grandfather’s knees our side control panels,
Knobs, switches, buttons known to only our eyes,
Through turns, tweaks and presses they transmitted signals,
And the engine room rogered, copied, complied.

His right hand held a cigarette up to the wind,
His face sometimes turned to meet it outside.
His left wrestled mysteriously with the forbidden lever
(The column shifter, the gear stick, that thing not for boys).
His voice bid our eyes to look back in the mirror,
All we saw was the ribbon we’d unspooled behind.

Our feet reach the pedals, we have wearied of conquest.
Willingly enslaved again by our lives,
We spin with the earth to keep up pretenses,
We spin into day, we spin into night.